Michelle Obama Credited with Changing First Lady Role Forever

Last week, while addressing the crowd at Southern New Hampshire University, Michelle Obama said that she had just wrapped the final event she would do as First Lady for her organization, Let Girls Learn. There were audible sighs in the crowd as everyone was reminded, once again, that the end of the Obama administration also means Michelle Obama won’t be First Lady anymore. So, as we ready ourselves for her departure from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, some very prominent voices penned thank-you notes in T magazine in a piece called “To the First Lady, With Love.”

Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, feminist icon Gloria Steinem, actress Rashida Jones, and Random House executive editor Jon Meacham shared their thoughts on why Obama’s eight years as First Lady changed the country for the better.

Adichie opens her piece with a scene from the 2008 Democratic National Convention, where she remembers Obama speaking, wearing a teal dress that “scorned any ‘future first lady’ stuffiness.” “She had the air of a woman who could balance a checkbook, and who knew a good deal when she saw it, and who would tell off whomever needed telling off,” Adichie recalls. “She was tall and sure and stylish.”

Steinem says she saw a “tall, strong, elegant and seriously smart woman who happened to live in the White House.” She remarks that Obama has managed to lead by example and set the tone for what it means to balance work and family.

“After a decade under a public microscope, she has managed what no other first lady—and few people in any public position—have succeeded in doing: She has lived a public life without sacrificing her privacy and authenticity,” Steinem writes. “Michelle Obama may have changed history in the most powerful way—by example.”

Jones points to the kind of woman who travels around the world for education initiatives while raising two teenage daughters of her own. She speaks of a multifaceted person who forced people to question the heretofore largely symbolic role of the First Lady.

“Her individual choices force us to accept that being a woman isn’t just one thing. Or two things. Or three things,” Jones muses. “If feminism’s goal is equal opportunity and choice, Michelle makes me feel like every choice is available . . . Michelle Obama will have her own legacy, separate from her husband’s. And it will be that she was the first First Lady to show women that they don’t have to choose. That it’s okay to be everything.”